reinstall needed for new hardware?

msound · 07-08-2005, 12:27 PM

hey gang this evening im gonna re-arrange my hardware setup and i was wondering if im going to need to reinstall my OS (Suse 9.1 pro) if i hook the harddrive up to a new motherboard. I know windows gets pissy with new chipset drivers and its always recommended to do a fresh install, but i was wondering if i could get away without doing a fresh install with Linux. Basically the OS is going to be hooked up to a new motherboard and cpu. Let me know.

rose_bud4201 · 07-08-2005, 12:38 PM

It may depend on how radical the change is (i.e. from 32bit to 64bit, or something).
The only thing I can think would complain could be your kernel, and you could simply recompile that instead of reinstalling Linux in its entirety.

msound · 07-08-2005, 12:41 PM

cool beans, nothing major like that. just 32bit to 32bit motherboard and cpu upgrade. thanks for the reply.

rose_bud4201 · 07-08-2005, 12:45 PM

Sure thing. If anything does break, I'd say download the sources for your kernel, if you don't have them already, and a good howto before you do the hardware upgrade, and make sure you've got a good linux bootdisk on hand. That way, you'll at least be able to boot up with something.

Crito · 07-08-2005, 12:45 PM

I'd say it depends on the distro's automatic hardware detection and configuration. I've done exactly what you described with Mandrake 9.2 and the drake tools reconfigured everything correctly on the first boot. Attempting the same thing with Gentoo, however, would likely yield a completely different result. I have no idea how well SuSE would handle it.

Just backup /etc and /home first and even if you have to reinstall you won't lose anything.